Mary Gaither
Mary Gaither was baptized on 4 October 1724 in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She was a daughter of John Gaither of Abington, the plantation between the Severn and South Rivers, and his second wife Elizabeth Duvall. "Mary Gaither, bap. Oct. 4, 1724, married ___ Warfield," Harry Wright Newman wrote in his 1933 history of the Anne Arundel families.
Her father had ten children by his first wife, Jane Buck, who died in 1716. Her mother had two by her first husband, Benjamin Warfield, who died the same year: Joshua and Elizabeth Warfield. Her parents married about 1717. Mary was the third of their eight children, after Amos and Ruth and before Joshua, Rezin, John, Edward and Elizabeth.
Her father died in 1739, when she was fifteen. His will divided Abington among seven of her brothers and half-brothers and left a tract called Left Out to three more. Her mother was his executrix.
About 1750 to 1754 she married Seth Warfield, born in January 1723, a son of Richard Warfield and Marian Caldwell. The two families were already close kin. Seth's grandmother, Ruth Gaither, was her father's sister, so Seth's father was her first cousin. Her mother's first husband, Benjamin Warfield, had been a brother of Seth's grandfather. J. D. Warfield's 1905 history names her as "Mary, wife of Seth Warfield," and Newman names "Beale, son of Seth and Mary (Gaither) Warfield."
Her children were Seth, born about 1752, and Benjamin, born in 1755, with Beale, Elizabeth, Azel, Eli and Amos. Benjamin is probably the son her husband's will calls Bani. Five of the sons went up the Old Frederick Road together and seated themselves on Warfield's Forest, near Lisbon, to grow tobacco. "They took for their wives a Welsh, three Dorseys and a Welling," the 1905 history says.
Her husband patented Warfield's Folly in 1760 and had Warfield's Forest resurveyed at 1,800 acres in 1794. He made his will in 1798 and died in 1805. Her son Seth died in 1812.
She was dead by 1814. Her half-brother Benjamin Gaither, a son of her father's first marriage, died childless in Prince George's County in 1793, and lawsuits over his large estate ran for twenty years. The chancery court, which handled estates and disputes over property, ordered $3,937.68 from the sale of his personal estate divided "among his brothers and sisters and their legal representatives." By 1814 only two of them were alive, Joshua Gaither and Ruth Davis, and one share went to "the heirs of Mary Warfield." "Believed to be buried there are Seth Warfield, his wife Mary and many of their descendants," Celia Holland wrote of Warfield's Forest in her book on the old homes of Howard County.
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Cite: Heirology, "Mary Gaither (b. 1724)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mary-gaither-1724-97342d.